Film Reviews

We Have A Pope

• Rating:
• Director: Nanni Moretti
• Starring: Michel Picolli
• Details: Italy / 102mins (PG)

We Have A Pope. We also have a missed opportunity. A plot that screams out for humour and drama, writer-director Nanni Moretti can't find enough of both to keep things ticking over.
There is a buzz in The Vatican: the cardinals are in conclave as they wait for a new pope to be elected. That turns out to be the reluctant Cardinal Melville (Picolli), who, moments before he greets the waiting public from his balcony, suffers a panic attack and runs from the scene. A psychoanalyst (Moretti), an atheist, is called with strict instructions not to tackle subjects like sex, the pontiff's mother, childhood and anything else worth talking about. The session is a disaster and, during a trip into Rome, Melville skips out on his minders and roams the streets incognito. Meanwhile Moretti, forbidden to leave the city until the normality resumes, wanders its halls, engaging in conversations on life, the universe and everything...
Like Moretti's last picture, Il Caiman, the humour is of the subtle kind, but unlike that 2006 comedy We Have A Pope is inconsistent. A Pope in session with an non-believing therapist would have made for an interesting comedy – an In Treatment/Sopranos-esque one-on-one – but admittedly that wouldn't be as visually interesting as, say, a volleyball tournament of ageing cardinals. The latter actually happens in We Have A Pope but is however not as funny as it sounds. That's the problem with the entire film: amiable, likeable but isn't as dramatic or as funny as it could be. An atheist trapped in The Vatican? A pope loose on the streets of Rome? A Vatican official running around trying to pretend to everyone The Pope is still in the building? There should have been a mountain of jokes to take from but Moretti is in a lazy mood here.
Moretti wants to paint The Pope as a man first and the pope second and in this he succeeds – Melville confesses he wanted to be an actor - but to what end? It's hard to see what the point of the endeavour is, or what Moretti has to say apart a snigger at the Holy See's absurd rituals and traditions. Every now and then his psychoanalyst and a cardinal argue creationism versus evolution but Moretti doesn't mine the conversation for jokes or points. If Il Caiman was a thinly veiled swipe at Silvio Berlusconi's leadership, then We Have A Pope can be seen that way too: those unable to lead should step aside. Moretti's latest seems like a long-winded way to say just that.

Review by Gavin Burke